


Tangential Kidverse; or, Five Times the Hotchner-Rossi Family Changed the Life of a Stranger (And One Time A Stranger Became a Friend)

by ethelindi (eventide)



Category: Criminal Minds, NCIS, Shadow Unit
Genre: Adoption, Child Abuse, Coming Out, Crossover, Domestic Violence, F/F, F/M, Foster Care, Gen, M/M, Multi, Original Characters - Freeform, cm: family verse, cm: kidverse, runaways - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-18
Updated: 2010-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-08 02:45:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/71884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eventide/pseuds/ethelindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The most tangential chapter yet. Ignore timeline screwery, please; set before Aaron and Dave get any of the kids, back when they're testing out this foster care thing by taking very short-term cases. (Do they even know Abby at that point? Oops. AU of an AU, and just wait for the bizarre timeline of the next chapter!))</p></blockquote>





	1. In which Aaron has a chat with a witness' wife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melliyna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melliyna/gifts).



She'll never forget the intensity of his eyes when he takes her aside.

"I hope you won't be offended if I'm wrong," he says quietly, "But if I am, you and your daughter deserve better than this."

She tenses, and resists the urge to find a mirror to check the heavy make-up covering her bruises. He has no reason to talk to her--she's only the wife of a material witness (for the defense, no less), but he's standing there anyway. More than that, he's looking at her like she's an actual human being (when was the last time anyone had done that?), and she isn't afraid, not beyond a certain expected anxiety.

He presses a stack of business cards into her hand, and leaves before she can shake the sense of vertigo enough to reply. God knows what she would have said anyway, really. Stomach churning, she ducks into to the restroom and searches her reflection for the thing that gave her away. The first thing she checks is her make-up, and her muscles loosen a little when she finds nothing showing through it. Next is her hair; there's a small patch near the back that's scabbed over and bare, but that's completely hidden by her careful bun. She checks her clothes for anything that might have given her away, and doesn't find it. The only thing wrong with the woman in the mirror is the fear in her eyes, and an unfortunate tendency to flinch.

She locks herself in one of the stalls and flips through the cards with shaking hands: the Domestic Violence Intake Center, an emergency shelter, and his own. The last has a cell number scrawled on the back, and a message.  
__

_You are strong enough to leave. If you can't do it for yourself, do it for your daughter._ A dark spot of ink where a pen had been held too long, and then, in more hesitant letters, _I wish my mother had._ Her breath catches in her throat and sticks there. _You are not alone. _

She doesn't call him. She _can't_ call him. But she does call her sister, and begin to talk in broken words that take forever to come. Shortly after that she takes her daughter and leaves while her husband is sleeping. They move into her sister's house.

She never does call the number on the back of the card. But in the months and years that follow, when she's afraid in the middle of the night, she'll take the card from the bottom drawer of her nightstand and hold it like a talisman.


	2. In which Derek wears a hideous yellow shirt, with name-tag

On the day before Thanksgiving, Caleb Donovan risks ducking out of the cold. The soup kitchen he enters is crowded, and with any luck he'll have time to get warm, maybe even get fed, before someone notices he's too young to be there.

It's an unseasonably freezing November. The clothes he left with in late August aren't doing him much good now. The fabric is wearing soft and thin, and admittedly he hadn't been thinking about winter when he left home. He hadn't been thinking anything, really, beyond _I have to get out of here, now_. There was an opportunity, and he took it. Planning ahead is not a fourteen-year-old's strong suit.

Caleb hides in the crowds long enough to thaw out some. He needs to be able to run if someone decides to report a runaway, because he's not going back to that place. But he makes it through the food line and to an unexpected empty table without anyone giving him a second glance. The grime he's covered in probably helps, and the fact that it's the day before Thanksgiving. There's plenty of new volunteers awkwardly not looking people in the face, just sort of shuffling around looking at the floor and doing their Good Thing for the year. Caleb makes it more than halfway through his meal before one of the volunteers (God, those bright yellow shirts are _hideous_) sits down at his table.

Yellow Shirt can't be much older than he is. He's got one of those stickers with 'HELLO, My Name Is' in blue letters, and 'Derek' scrawled in red marker across the middle. "You don't belong here," Yellow Shirt states. But it's a statement, not an accusation. Caleb doesn't think this kid is going to tell on him, and he'd really like to finish his meal. So he shrugs, and keeps eating, and his threat-level assessment is confirmed when the volunteer does nothing except sit quietly watch him with warm brown eyes. Yellow Shirt--_Derek_, Caleb amends, _since he's going to be nice_\--isn't going to kick him out or turn him in. Instead he's silently guarding Caleb from the other volunteers, an invisible Yellow Shirt Radius that keeps the rest of the staff away. There are too many unsupervised areas for the other volunteers to worry about. No one will give his corner of the room a second glance as long as Derek is at the table.

"Thank you," Caleb says after he crams the last piece of bread into his mouth. The words feel strange in his mouth, awkward from disuse.

Derek nods, and looks at him intently. "You should go home."

Caleb feels his face twist, and fails to keep the bitterness from seeping into his words. "I don't have one." Derek frowns.

"You're a minor, like me. If you don't have a place you can go, the government will give you one. You shouldn't be on the streets. It's cold."

Caleb snorts derisively. "I didn't say there was nowhere I could go, I said I don't have a home. I'm not going back there. That bastard isn't going to get his hands on me again."

Derek doesn't say anything at first, and Caleb is pretty sure he's managed to shut him up. But then Yellow Shirt has the nerve to say, "You should go to the police," and Caleb bristles.

"What do you know?" he snaps. "No way. They're the ones that put me with him in the first place!"

This gets another nod, which for some reason pisses him off. "They don't always get it right," the volunteer says quietly. "But sometimes they do. I think that's worth a second try." He points to a table across the room, where two men and a small battalion of children in yellow shirts are taking their scheduled break. "That's my family. It took a few tries, and some of the places I was before..." he trails off, and then shakes his head. "They weren't so nice. But the man that hurt me is in jail now, and I have a real family. It's worth it to keep trying."

"That's your family?" Caleb asks, and there's a wistfulness to his voice. "And those men don't..."

"Never," Derek says quietly. "And I think they'd hurt anyone who tried." Caleb watches Derek's family and wishes, and thinks. He can't believe he's seriously considering it. "There's another reason, too," Derek says, like he can sense Caleb's indecision. "If you don't go to the police, it's not going to be his fault you ran away. They're going to give him more kids." Caleb's mouth goes dry, and he looks over at Derek. Derek pushes his chair back and stands. "It's up to you," he tells Caleb, "But I think you owe it to them." Caleb watches Derek make his way over to the table across the room, where he's greeted warmly by his family. One of the men squeezes his shoulder affectionately, and he doesn't flinch or pull away.  
   
He tells himself as he walks out that he'll think about it, but he knows his decision is already made.


	3. In which Emily goes for a walk in the woods

Kelly is doing her level best to scrub the wetness from her cheeks and slow her breathing when she hears the crackle of breaking twigs. Still as a bunny rabbit, heart pounding, her body is trying to disappear into the pine tree she's leaning against before her mind catches up. She's been hiking this trail for a year now, though not usually at this hour of the afternoon, and of course she'd meet someone else on it for the first time _today_.

A young woman appears from the bend near the creek. She doesn't see Kelly, yet, but Kelly can see her well enough to recognize Emily Prentiss. Just her luck to be found crying by a freshman, and one who is more confident in her skin than Kelly can ever hope to be. Even as a senior with two weeks left, she's heard stories about this girl telling off Professor DuMaire. The pysch professor was somewhat infamous for her political rants, especially her insistence that men couldn't raise children properly. Rumor had it that a simple "My fathers have done just fine" had been enough to shut her up for the rest of the semester.

And then she turns around, and her eyes focus right on Kelly's. The pine tree still refuses to open up and let Kelly hide inside, and Emily is walking toward her with a friendly smile. But when she gets close enough to see the splotchy redness of Kelly's face, the smile disappears.

"Are you alright?" Emily looks genuinely concerned. There's no superiority or schadenfreude evident on her face, just the down-turned corners of her mouth and creased forehead. Kelly can tell already that Emily is one of those people with grace and sparkle and confidence, and she's only been there for a grand total of two minutes. Someone like that isn't going to understand, she's pretty sure, but it''s not like it's going to hurt anything.

"I'm in love," Kelly says miserably. "I am ridiculously, hopelessly in love." Emily leans against the stubbornly unhelpful pine and slides down until she's sitting next to Kelly, arms loosely around her knees.

"Okay," Emily says.

"She loves me back," Kelly tells the ground in front of her. "We've been together for three years now, and I can't imagine ever losing that. She wants to get married. _I_ want to get married." Her voice is choked, but she manages to get the words out and keep the tears in. "I know it sounds sappy, but I didn't believe in soul mates until I met Andrea. She's just, she's _perfect_."

Emily mostly blinks at her confusedly, waiting for something that makes sense. Kelly tips her head back to rest against the stupid tree. "I always hoped..." She stops, and then starts again. "I never told my mother I like girls," she says, still not looking at Emily. "I was hoping I would never need to. It's, I like guys too, so I thought I could just ignore it. I thought if I waited I'd meet the right guy, that we'd get married and Mom would never need to know. She's told me my entire life how she wants me to find a nice man to settle down with, to have lots of children with. But I _didn't_ meet the right guy, I met the right _girl_."

The tears she's managed to keep back so far return with a vengeance. "I don't want to hurt my mother," she says brokenly. "I don't want to disappoint her. She's done so much for me and I just, I want to make her happy. I want her to be proud. I don't want her to be ashamed of the daughter she gave up her life for. She was younger that I am now when she had me, and my father was no help at all, and her parents kicked her out and I just, I don't know if I can do this to her." The last words finish on a sob, and she buries her face in her arms.

There's a hesitant hand on her back and she just loses it. There's part of her that can't believe she's falling apart like this all over a freshman, but the rest of her is just achingly grateful for the presence of another human being. She's already done her share of crying, but it's always been where she doesn't have to worry about Andrea seeing. It's enough that she's upset, she doesn't need Andrea worried too.

When she's done, Emily pulls her into a brief hug. Kelly marvels, a little, at this strange bright creature who will hug strangers and then, apparently, give good advice. "Your mother's life was her life," Emily tells her. "This is yours. I don't think your mother would have gone through all that if she didn't want you to be happy."

"But--" Kelly says.

"No, really," Emily replies. "I don't know your mother, but she's given up a lot for you to have a good life. And it sounds like you're only worried she'll be disappointed, not that she's going to disown you or throw a frying pan at your head or, well, you'd be amazed at some of the coming out stories I've heard." She grins wryly. "But a woman who would give up that much for her child? Your happiness is more important to her than her definition of a good life. She'll adjust. She might be upset you didn't tell her sooner, but she'll adjust."

So Kelly thinks. And she keeps thinking after Emily leaves, and then she's kind of distracted during finals week, but eventually decides to talk to her mother. Emily is right--her mother is far more upset about the fact that Kelly has been keeping Andrea a secret for three years than the fact that she's female. Kelly gets a decent telling off (along the lines of "I'm your mother! I can't believe you didn't tell me about her!"), and it might take a little while for her mother to stop being upset about that, but that doesn't stop her mother from demanding that Kelly call Andrea and introduce them _right now_. Kelly calls from the house line. Her mother talks to Andrea, and somehow ends up talking to Andrea's mother, and when Kelly starts hearing pieces of conversation involving ribbon and flowers and reception locations, she figures it's safe to call Andrea from her cell phone.

"I think you may have created a monster," Andrea says dryly. "My parents are sitting at the kitchen table looking at wedding magazines, and plotting with your mother." Kelly laughs. "So then," her future wife says more seriously, "Everything went alright?"

"It did," Kelly answers. The truth of that finally sinks in, and she feels the tension in her neck and shoulders relax for the first time since Andrea proposed. "I love you."

"I love you too," Andrea says.

The rest wasn't perfect, but it was close enough.


	4. Wherein Pen forgets her drawing at the library

Sonia's given up on ever dragging her husband out of the library before he's ready to go. Russ gets obsessive about his books; it's kind of cute. He's been known to actually bounce in his seat when the library calls to tell him _Predator's Gold_ (or _I, Robot_ or _American Gods _or whichever book they've snagged for him from another local branch this week) is waiting behind the desk. She likes it when he reads to her, but she doesn't like to read herself; the words jump around on the page, and it makes her head hurt. When Russ looks at books, she usually waits at one of the tables.

She picks a spot near the children's section. There's more noise, but there's also brilliant little smiles and perfect, precious laughter. 

She's feeling a little masochistic today. It's been almost two months since her doctor informed her that her body just isn't capable of carrying a child to term, and nearly six since her last miscarriage. A father walks over to the table where a little girl with blond curls is coloring, and when she jumps up to throw her arms around his neck, Sonia feels the ache in her chest spread. She is acutely aware of her barrenness, the feeling of death lurking inside her body. A familiar anger and self-hatred curls in the pit of her stomach.

  
The man walks away with his little girl in his arms, leaving her picture on the table. Before she thinks about it, Sonia is pulling herself up using the chair back and walking over to the table. As she reaches down to pick up the paper, the woman behind the children's circulation desk speaks.

"Oh, Pen forgot her picture again! And they just walked out, too. Oh well, another for the bulletin board!" Sonia looks down at the picture in her hand. It's a crayon drawing in bright colors, surprisingly well-drawn people against a cerulean sky. In one corner there's a huge sun with a smiling face.

"Is this her family?"

"Oh, yes," the woman replies. "Her fathers and her siblings. They're such lovely people. They're been coming here for ages, even before they got the kids."

Sonia restrains herself from asking the obvious ("Fathers?" or "They're adopted, then?") and hands the picture over. She studies the picture as the woman pins it to the bulletin board. The crayon people are all different; one of the smaller ones is pink, with a purple dress, and there's a tall boy drawn in orange with a soccer ball. The adults (probably, anyway, they're the biggest) are scribbled in green and red, and there's a yellow-gold girl and a maroon one and also a very small person of indeterminate gender in seafoam green.  But all of the crayon-people have one thing in common: big red smiles.

  


"They look so happy," Sonia says wistfully. 

  


The other woman nods agreement. "There's no such thing as a perfect family, but they come the closest I've seen. It's hard to believe there are people out there who would take that away. It's so hard on foster kids, being bounced around from place to place. There aren't enough good parents out there to take any away."

  


Just like that the ache in her chest is back, only this time it's on behalf of those children. Maybe she's never been a child without parents, but she knows what it's like to be a parent without a child. And then the inevitable idea occurs: maybe somehow those two halves can become a family. It's simple but it's something she hasn't considered before, a solution from outside her frame of reference. It seems strange not to have thought about it before, now that the concept is weaving its silvery way through the tangle of anger and despair she's carried for the past months.

  


She vows at that moment to talk it over with Russ as soon as possible.


	5. The one where Abby Sciuto guest-stars, and people drink coffee from colorful mugs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The most tangential chapter yet. Ignore timeline screwery, please; set before Aaron and Dave get any of the kids, back when they're testing out this foster care thing by taking very short-term cases. (Do they even know Abby at that point? Oops. AU of an AU, and just wait for the bizarre timeline of the next chapter!))

The one thing Max is sure of is that he's not at his stepfather's house any longer, and he doesn't have to go back. Once the nice lady got that across, he was too busy being relieved to understand anything else. 

She _was_ nice. He didn't know her name, but 'nice lady' was accurate enough. Anyone who took him away from Steven was beyond nice already, but then she'd taken him to McDonald's and let him play on the slides (he hadn't gotten to do that since Mom died), and also brought him to a square grey building for clothes. They weren't new clothes, but they were clean and they actually fit, and that was better than he'd had in a while.

The nice lady is leaving him now, in a house with two men in it. He stands close to her as she talks to them, glancing at the men every so often when they aren't looking. One of the men gestures animatedly while he talks, and the other one stands very still and smiles with his eyes. Mostly, though, he's watching the nice lady--he can make out "temporary", "uncle", and "tomorrow night" from her words, but he's tired and emotionally drained and his brain just doesn't want to work. 

There's two taps at his shoulder and he startles. Oops- it's the eye-smile man, and he's got the look that means he was talking and Max didn't notice. "S-sorry," Max squeaks. "What?" He makes himself focus. Eye-smile man tells him names; he's Aaron, and the other one is Dave. Dave, who is being warm and friendly at Max with his entire body, would make a good Santa Claus. But Max finds himself inching closer to Aaron as the nice lady leaves. Aaron is calm and gentle and doesn't move unexpectedly.

  


  


Max goes back to staring at the floor, since he doesn't really know what else to do. It's not long before there's another tap on his shoulder. Dave is frowning at him and then at Aaron, and then he takes a cell phone from his pocket. Probably to call the nice lady to bring them a different kid because he's bad, lazy, not paying attention. And he wasn't, which was stupid, but he can't change that now and at least they aren't hitting him for it. Well, he doesn't think they will. Neither of them look angry, only frowny.

  


  


Aaron presses a towel and pajamas into his hands (_when did he leave to go get those?_ Max wonders, and concludes he's more tired than he thought) and leads him to the bathroom. It's stupid to hesitate, but he does anyway. He's only going to be here for one night; the danger in resisting is minimal.

Aaron's eyes turn sharp and sad when Max stays in the hall. One hand curls toward his mouth and he breathes out. He reaches for the door handle and twists the lock before moving back into the hallway. "Lock the door," he tells Max. His eyes are sort of squinty. "No one will come in."

  


  


Max un-freezes a little. He looks at Aaron again, the way his arms are curled around himself, how his eyebrows and mouth are pulled down a little. Max doesn't see danger or dishonesty. He darts into the bathroom, clutching his towel and the pajamas from the grey building, and locks the door behind him. He waits a few minutes after he turns the shower on, just in case, but there's no one jiggling the door handle so he figures it's probably safe to undress. The water is hot enough to turn his skin a dull red by the time he's done (unless it was the way he scrubbed at it, like he could wash it off). He puts on the pajamas, which are light blue with duckies on them, and brushes his teeth with his finger. He's not sure whether he's allowed to use the toothpaste next to the sink, so he's careful to only use a little and squeeze from the bottom of the tube. Max combs his hair with his fingers and carefully wipes the floor and counter before he unlocks the door. He doesn't know where to put the towel, so he picks it up and takes it with him as he makes his way back to the kitchen. A small part of him is afraid that Aaron and Dave aren't going to be there, somehow, that they've vanished while he was in the shower. It's a silly thing to think just because neither of them walked in while he was in the bathroom, especially since he's mostly sure people aren't supposed to do that anyway, but he's thinking it anyway and he wants to make sure. He kind of likes Aaron and Dave so far.

The grown-ups haven't disappeared. They've multiplied; when he makes his way down the steps and into the kitchen, there's a lady sitting at the table with Dave and Aaron. They're drinking out of funny coffee mugs (Aaron's has cartoonish cats, Dave's has rainbow stick-people, and the woman's is bright bright yellow with stickers all over) and playing cards. The new person has black hair and black clothes and a smile that's bigger than Dave's. She seems kind of...bouncy. Sparkly. She's the first to notice him, since her chair faces his direction. Her smile gets even bigger and she waves at him (flails her arms at him, really). He's busy looking at her so he doesn't see Dave talking until the lady looks at him. "I think you're right," she says. He's feeling a little less fuzzy after his shower and catches every word. He doesn't know what the words mean, so even though they don't seem good, Max tries to ignore the fear curling in his belly. He turns to Dave, but Dave only stands up to take his towel and directs his attention to the sparkly woman.

  


  


_Hi!_, she says, only instead of saying it the way everyone else has she says it with her hands. Max feels his eyes get big and round and his mouth open. _My name is Abby_ (twice: A-B-B-Y, and PIGTAILS).

_You sign!_ he says excitedly, fingers fumbling over the shapes. He hasn't seen anyone sign since his mother passed away, almost a year ago. It was forbidden by his stepfather (_You can speak like a normal person of not at all_, and_ You can read lips just fine, you lazy_ _brat_), who had put him in public school once his mother wasn't around to home-school him. As far as his school records were concerned, he was just a bit slow, far from the truth as that might be. _My name is Max_, he tells Abby. M-A-X, and M tapped on the cheek.

Abby grins delightedly and her hands start flying. Max is too absorbed and ecstatic to notice the way Aaron and Dave smile softly at one another, or Aaron picking up the phone to call Max's social worker. Abby stays until it's time for Max to sleep, and when the sun filtering through the blinds wakes him the next morning, she's padding out of the other guest room.

_Your uncle is here,_ she tells him. His father's brother, the one he didn't even know existed. Max bites his lip nervously but Abby sets a reassuring hand on his shoulder and they walk down the stairs. She's still in her pajamas, too, so he feels a little less silly.

  


  


His uncle--Riley, he's pretty sure--is standing with Aaron, Dave, and the nice lady. Max reaches up to touch his own red hair when he sees his uncle's--long, pulled back into a ponytail. Riley turns and sees him, and at first all he does is stare. "You look so much like Seth," Riley says. "So much like your father." Max, who doesn't remember his father, is caught up staring at this man that looks like, well, him. Somehow the resemblance sets him at ease, and he doesn't mind when Riley walks over and touches his hair.

  


  


They can't leave right away. Max contents himself with watching his uncle talk to the nice lady and Abby, and sign forms. When Riley finally smiles hesitantly at him and gestures toward the door, Abby follows them outside.

  


  


"You'll be fine," she says, to Max or to Riley or both. She presses a black rectangle with silver text into Riley's hand. "I'm sure Family Services can connect you with any resources you might need," she tells Riley. "But if they can't, or even if you need someone to talk to about all this, give me a call. I have some friends in Maine. Near where you live, even." She smiles at Riley, and squeezes Max's shoulder, and disappears back inside the house.

  


  


Max gets in the car and presses the end of the safety belt into the buckle until he feels it click. Riley is doing the same next to him, and Max feels the car rumble to a start. There's some sort of base-heavy music playing, and he turns to smile shyly at Riley as they both settle in for a very long car ride.


	6. In which there are sidewalk chalk mermaids and track meets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please temporarily pretend that DC and Las Vegas are the same place, and ignore all the other small inconsistencies that I can claim artistic license for. :cough: Also, if you haven't read Shadow Unit...you should, but this should still make sense. ;)

The first time he meets Spencer is in kindergarten. Chaz is sitting at a low table, making purple trees with finger-paint. It's not hard; dip, swirl, smear, repeat. He makes sure they look like the other kids' trees. Purple is okay, but they have to stay the same shape (round, without any holes or broken branches or dead parts), because otherwise some grown-up or another asks too many questions. They'll want to talk to Mom, or they'll send Chaz to talk to the man who wears funny ties and smells like cats.

Spence, once he squirms out of his father's good-bye hug, sits next to him. "Trees are green," Spence announces solemnly. "Or orange or red or yellow, in the fall. Not purple." 

"I like purple," Chaz tells him. Spence reaches for a piece of paper. "Your trees can be green or red or orange or yellow. Mine are purple."

Spencer loses the serious frown and dips his fingers in the yellow paint. After a brief hesitation, he sticks the fingers on his other hand into the purple. That's when Chaz knows they're going to be friends.

***

It's another year before he sees Spencer outside of school for the first time. There's a man over at his house, and Mom sent him out to play like she always does. He's riding Sammie's bike. Sammie doesn't ride his bike much now, because he's too tall for it, so Chaz is usually allowed to borrow it. Sammie's sister hardly ever says no, as long as he asks politely. He likes Sammie's sister. She's 22, and Sammie and his baby brother live with her. (Chaz doesn't ask why, and Sammie doesn't ask questions when they can't play at Chaz's house. It works.)

It's Thursday afternoon, and he's riding through one of the neighborhoods with the pretty houses. Chaz likes to ride around and imagine owning one someday, bringing Mom to live with him and having an entire house to themselves. He imagines a backyard with a swing-set, a vegetable garden, a sandbox. He imagines never being sent away while Mom is working, never seeing her hands shake, never being afraid.

Chaz slows to a stop when he sees Spencer. He's playing in one of the driveways with a girl wearing fairy wings. They're sitting among the wreckage of a bucket of chalk, and the girl is trying to make Spencer hold still while she traces his outline on the concrete. Chaz pushes away the sharp bite of envy when Spencer sits up and waves. "Hi, Chaz!", he calls out. The girl frowns at Spence and tries to make him lie down again, but he hops to his feet. "Come play with me!"

So Chaz walks Sammie's bike across the street and carefully puts the kickstand down. The girl, he learns, is Spence's big sister Pen. She's nice like Spencer, although Chaz isn't so sure how to react when she asks him to draw her a mermaid. He doesn't think boys are supposed to draw mermaids, but he decides he doesn't care. Pen and Spence are nice and maybe his friends, and if they like mermaids then he will too.

It's not long before the front door of the house opens and people come pouring out. There's a _lot_ of them, two girls and a boy and two men. One of the adults says "Pen, Spence, clean up. It's time for Derek's soccer game." Derek, Chaz decides, must be the tall one in the red jersey and cleats.

"Can Chaz come?", Pen asks.

Chaz feels his face heat up. He wouldn't have asked, but Pen asked for him, and it's true that he can't go home yet. He's afraid he's intruding, though, so he stammers out "I'm sorry. I, I can go home, Mister...um..."

"Dave," Pen and Spencer's Daddy says. "Hello, Chaz. You're in Spencer's class, right?" Chaz swallows nervously and nods. "Do your parents know you're here?"

He considers the best way to answer that question before settling on "Sort of. She told me to go play, and be home at eight." Of course, his mother didn't mean _be home by eight_. She meant _don't come home until after eight_. But that wasn't something he was supposed to tell.

"Okay," Dave says, and glances at the other man. They have a short conversation with their eyes, and then Dave turns back to him. "Well, Derek's game will be over by six. If it's okay with your mother, you're welcome to come along. Spence and Pen can always use another playmate. Do you want to use our phone?"

"I-" Chaz feels his vocal cords tighten. "She's working. I'm not supposed to call." He's not entirely sure the phone bill was paid last month, either, but that's not the important part. The important part is that he really can't call home, not now.

The adults frown at each other. The one who isn't Dave says, "Who do you call for emergencies?"

"I can call Sammie's sister," he says. For actual emergencies he's supposed to call Mrs. K, but this isn't one. "They're our neighbors. Not right next to us, but down the street."

"Okay," Not-Dave says. "Why don't you call her, just in case, and let her know we'll bring you home at eight. It'll be dark by then, and you shouldn't be riding your bike."

Chaz bites his lip. "Okay, but...it's not my bike, it's Sammie's. I have to bring it back tonight. I mean, I, I didn't steal it, I borrowed it, I just have to--"

"We'll put in in the garage," Aaron says gently, mercifully stopping his babbling. "When we drive you home we can put it in the trunk."

Chaz squirms a little. He doesn't really want these people to see where he lives, but he does want to go with them. "Okay," he says eventually, and allows Not-Dave (who introduces himself as Aaron) to bring him inside to use the phone.

***

Chaz finds his way to Spencer's house often, after that first time. He learns the names of the entire riot of children. Dave cooks for him (and sometimes lets Chaz help), and in the spring Aaron meets his mother. Chaz managed to tie himself up in knots about that before it happened, but he made sure Mom was presentable and Aaron convinced her to let Chaz join the track team with Spence. Once that happens he sees them even more, because they take him to practice every week.

Mom isn't there when he wins his first race, but Dave makes him a cake the same way he did for Spence a month earlier. He spends time with Pen, playing computer games and learning about Pen's favorite mythical creatures. Sometimes he and Spence will stay in during lunch with their math teacher, who is positively gleeful over having such interested students. Chaz listens to Emily's impassioned rants on various political topics, and lets Derek try to teach him football (which, eh, doesn't go so well). He goes on swing-sets with JJ, and listens to Aaron and Dave talk about helping people at work. He gets used to bear hugs. He learns what it means to have a safe place.

And then his mother dies.

  


It takes 14 minutes for the ambulance to show up. Too long, and he'd waited so long to call, but she told him everything was fine and he wanted to believe her. But then she stopped answering him. By the time the ambulance gets there she's not breathing, either. The EMTs toss around phrases that burn into his mind, things like "heroin overdose", "DOA", "nothing we can do here". They bundle him into the back of the ambulance with his mother's body.

  
There's a woman at the hospital who asks if there's someone he needs to call. He takes the phone from her and dials. He knows the number better than his own, which isn't saying much since his is - was -out of service half the time anyway. It rings twice before he hears Dave say "Hello?", and all of Chaz's necessity-induced calm disappears.

"Dave," he chokes out. It's one small word, but there's such emotion attached that it barely gets past the agony constricting his throat.

"Chaz? What's wrong?"

"I--" He looks desperately at the woman who gave him the phone, and she takes it back from him with a reassuring squeeze to his shoulder. Chaz lets his eyes slide shut as he struggles for control of his body, sitting tensely motionless until the woman presses the phone to his ear again.

"Chaz? Hang on. I'll be there as soon as I can. Breathe, kid."

"Okay," he says hoarsely. The woman takes the phone away again.

Dave gets to the hospital quickly that Chaz is surprised he wasn't pulled over on the way. He doesn't know how many miles are between the Hotchner-Rossi house and the hospital, but he knows it's too many for Dave to have been going at any reasonable speed. He processes this on a detached, abstract level, while his body is busy flinging itself at Dave.

"I've got you," Chaz hears. "I've got you." That same detached trail of thought notices that Dave is saying this into his ear. Chaz is tall, but he's not that tall. In a moment of dizzy reorientation, he realizes that Dave is holding him like he sometimes holds Spencer, even though they're both too big for it. He suppresses a twitch and buries his face in Dave's shoulder. 

They stay like that until someone from social services absolutely has to take Chaz away.

"Call us," Dave tells him, his voice a little raw. "Whenever. Wherever you are. Collect, if you have to."

Chaz doesn't call. They're an amazing family, but they don't belong to him.

***

Charles Villette, 23, has been working for the Anomalous Crimes Task Force for three weeks when an incredulous voice stops him in the hallway.

"Chaz?" He turns around and sees David Rossi, hair grayer and smile lines deeper than they used to be but otherwise unchanged. He remembers, belatedly, that Dave used to work for the FBI. Apparently he still does, though Chaz has heard Sol talking about his impending retirement often enough to wonder how. Dave doesn't give him time to think about how long it's been since they've seen each other, or the aversion to physical contact he's developed in the intervening years.  He's covering the distance to Chaz in long strides, and then Chaz is wrapped in the kind of bear hug he hasn't experienced in...a very long time. He surprises himself by clinging back, reluctant to let go, and momentarily the world is safe and good and right. 

Dave accepts no excuses and drags him home after work (well, for Chaz it's after work. Dave, he learns, is guest-lecturing). _Home_?, Chaz thinks with an internal eye-roll at himself. _Be a little more transparent, why don't you._

It's a little like nothing has changed, except everything has. Emily and Spence are home temporarily, but they don't live there any longer. Spence's face when he walks in the door is something to be framed, and Chaz is amused to note that the man is as tall and gangly as ever. Chaz is still thinner, but there's his insane metabolism to blame for that. Aaron looks a little worn around the edges and there's silver threading his hair, but the grin when he sees Chaz is just like it always used to be. 

No one asks why he never called, though there will be plenty of time in the future for that question. Chaz finds himself spilling hurts and triumphs to people he's never needed to censor himself around, and hearing story after story in return.

They won't even let him go home that night, not after finding out he has the next day off. He settles gratefully into a cot in Spencer's room for the night, since Spence won't let him out of his sight. In the morning, Chaz finally gets the opportunity to say the words he's wanted to for fifteen long years: _Thank you_.


End file.
